Will 2013 be the Year of the New Fire or Not?

2012 has seen a lot of progress and news in low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) particularly important have been the revelations about Brillouin, Defkalion, NASA and George Miley and the public demonstrations of the Celani and NANOR reactors. Many of us are wondering if 2013 is going to be the year of cold fusion or theNew Fireor not?

My personal guess is that 2013 like 2012 will see a lot of small steps toward the final goal but no Big Breakthrough. Instead we’ll get a lot of slow and steady work towards the final objective. We’ll probably hear about a number of new LENR work much of it associated it with the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project.

We’ll probably hear more pronouncements from Andrea Rossi who has promised to make a third party report about his ecat device available in February. Since Rossi has had to redesign his device several times my guess is that he isn’t as close to a working device as he has claimed, although he might actually have a hot ecat.

The same might be said of our friends at Defkalion and Brillouin, like Rossi they’ve made bold claims but haven’t backed them up yet. My guess is that like Rossi, Brillouin and Defkalion are capable of achieving reactions but not controlling them in the way they’d like.

We’ll probably see some interesting announcements from Peter Hagelstein who has been working with the NANOR device at MIT for around a year. He might actually deliver a theory that explains LENR or at least some proof for one. Another surprise might come from Francessco Piantelli who has applied for an LENR patent. Piantelli has been working on a process similar to Rossi’s.

Some of the better work might come through the Fleischmann Project which is trying to spread the Celani technology through an open sourced effort. Such an open sourced effort is important because of the nature of LENR. The best way to get a breakthrough is to have a large number of people in various places working on it which seems to be happening.

So what should we be working for in LENR anyway? Here are the characteristics of a successful LENR device:

Capable of generating enough heat to create large amounts of steam or hot air for long periods of time.

Capable of being turned on and off.

These claims must also be independently verified by a number of different individuals and groups. That would include scientists, engineers, physicists, journalists, investors etc.

We’ll probably know when this occurs because whoever achieves it will be dragging people into the workshop to see it. They’ll want to spread the word in order to attract venture capital.

My prediction is that it will take several months or a year for an inventor to reach that point. It may take several months or a year after that to verify for it and probably a few years to create an LENR process that can be marketed commercially. The people who expect LENR to emerge fully functional from the workshop will be disappointed.

Now for a few other predictions for LENR in 2013:

We’ll keep hearing bold but unverified claims from Andrea Rossi, Robert Godes of Brillouin and others.

We’ll see slow but study progress from the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project.

We’ll see more interest in LENR from big corporations and big government. Some of this will be kept under wraps in order to protect researchers and the organizations they work for from ridicule by closed minded physicists and their mouthpieces in the media.

The US media will continue to ignore LENR and LENR work until a major breakthrough occurs or somebody with big money gets involved. A wild card here is Scott Pelley the anchor of the CBS Evening News who did an LENR piece for 60 Minutes two years ago. He is apparently a believer and he has the clout to get an honest cold fusion story on the air.

Hedge funds and other big time investors will start putting money into LENR. Some of them are probably already doing this covertly.

The scientific establishment will continue its silence about LENR because it hasn’t made up its mind about the process yet. A few skeptics will attack it but most physicists will ignore it and hope it goes away.

Defkalion might get up and going again now that it has moved its offices to Vancouver, British Colombia.

We’ll probably see some attempts to make steam and generate electricity with an LENR device. Most likely by Andrea Rossi but possibly by Kressen, Piantelli or Brillouin. It remains to be seen whether they will be successful or not.

More LENR research efforts will be launched in 2013. Some of these will be publicized.

The new fire probably won’t be lit in 2013 but more of the ground work necessary to making it a reality will be laid in the next year. My guess is that 2014 or 2015 will be the year in which see an LENR device actually generating electricity.